Through a Glass Darkly
by Vesica
Summary: Sometimes we cannot see the very thing we have been looking at our whole lives. Giles is about to get a new perspective.


**Title:** Through a Glass Darkly  
**Author:** Vesica  
**Rating:** PG  
**Distribution:** Of Demons and Destiny. Others – ask first.  
**Summary:** Sometimes we cannot see the very thing we have been looking at our whole lives. Giles is about to get a new perspective.

**Author's Notes:** Written for Ruth as part of her **Abandon Ship! Giles genficathon**. She requested:

_**Place:** Heaven, or a heavenly dimension depending on your POV  
**An emotion:** surprise  
**An object:** A silver spoon  
**Rating:** No preference  
**Unwanteds:** No onscreen characters from either series  
**Unwillings:** try anything once, more or less:-)  
_  
Also, R – you scared me half to death assigning me to you. Somehow I have overcome the crippling conviction that I can't possibly write Giles in way that is anywhere near your level of skill and given this a try. Also, many thanks to Foxfire, the best beta in the history of the universe!

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Wherever he was, it was dark – impossibly dark, as if this place had never entertained even a passing acquaintance with light.

Perhaps if he opened his eyes? No, he was still amid an endless nothing and he wasn't entirely sure he _had_ eyes.

He tried to remember how he came to be here, but memory too proved a sort of nothingness.

Time passed – perhaps a few minutes or maybe an hour. With only the blackness, it was impossible to tell.

A tiny sparkle drew his attention. A silvery light flickered – disappearing and reappearing in a somewhat regular pattern.

He found it was a relief to have something to concentrate on, some problem to unravel.

The flickering light grew larger and he could perceive movement, not just towards him but perhaps a spinning.

Something about the way the light flickered suggested something metallic but it was a few moments before he could make a good guess about what it was.

A name came to him. Before he could question why, his other observations all clicked with this new idea.

It was a spoon, a silver spoon, slowly tumbling end over end.

It slowly spun closer, coming within a few feet of him, before stopping, hanging motionless in the nothingness.

It edges wavered and he watched, fascinated, as it collapsed in on itself, becoming a small sphere of rippling quicksilver. Slowly, the silver flowed outwards forming a new object.

He blinked at the dagger hanging before him. It was the ritual dagger they had used in summoning Eyghon.

The dagger melted and was replaced by a signet ring bearing the Council's seal, which was in turn replaced by a pair of silver-framed spectacles, then a rapier, an ancient looking scroll, and finally, a silver spoon again.

It quivered briefly, before exploding into a rain of shining dust. The fall of sparkling glitter settled as if hitting some invisible barrier and formed a sort of a line. No, more of a path or perhaps a thread.

Other threads appeared all around it, dull grey next to the sterling light of the first. Two threads twined around his and the bundle stretched out away from him.

He had flashes of his youth, his young cousins, his school days, and childhood playmates.

A sudden knowledge came to him. This thread, then, was _his_ thread. He had no idea why it should be so, simply that it was.

As the threads lengthened, the first two threads fell away and his own darkened, new threads moving closer to his own.

One of the original threads flickered and abruptly ended, quickly followed by the other.

He watched his thread darken, the gleam becoming tarnished, and a thread close to this own flared a brilliant red and ended abruptly. _Oh God, Randall_.

He began to understand. His father dying, his mother following a mere six months later. And Randall – Randall dying by his hand. This was his life – and more importantly, the deaths, the horrible deaths of almost everyone around him. Which mean...

He was dead. Suddenly, he remembered looking down at his own body, lying in bed, and thinking at first he was having some sort of a vision. But his body wasn't breathing and as Dawn came to wake him the next morning, he knew with a strange sort of certainty what had happened. The medics confirmed it later.

It wasn't an Apocalypse, or a demon or vampire that had killed him, but a tiny leaking blood vessel had done him in. All those blows to the head over the years, while fighting for his life, had caused tiny aneurysms. It had only been a matter of time before one ruptured. It did seem rather ironic though, that of all the ways he could die, and all the ways those around him _had_ died, that he was granted the luxury of going in his sleep.

Lost in his own thoughts, he didn't pay much attention as the threads wove themselves into a new pattern – other paths crossing his – until another shining thread appeared, this one a pinkish bronze. It ran parallel to his, other faintly gleaming threads circling them both, until it too flared and ended. But unlike the last, this one slowly glimmered back to life and continued on, a point of shadow the only proof of its abrupt end.

Another pale green thread was not so fortunate. It was there, weaving all around his own thread for too brief a time, before ending in a crimson flash. His heart ached all over again for Jenny, even more so than for Buffy, which awakened the old guilt.

Turning his attention back to his own thread, he winced to see a nearby thread flicker and dim, running on, alone, for a length, before finally disappearing out of his narrow view. _I should have done more for Faith, tried harder in those early years. Perhaps she could have been spared some of that._

Threads wove themselves faster and faster – new lines drawing near and pulling away as the Scoobies grew up and moved on.

_But they didn't really move on, did they?_

He wanted to look away, but couldn't as he watched Joyce's thread dim and fade, then Buffy's – again, then Tara's, then Willow's turn as dark as night.

There was an almost blinding flash of ruddy light as the majority of the Council was wiped out in an instant.

The glare faded and the smaller flashes began – Anya, potentials whose names he had barely learned, Spike.

Years flew by as the threads raced – past Robin's death, past Willow's, past Buffy's third and final death, past Andrew's, past Rona's.

He could see the end of his own thread in the distance as Faith's line flared red and went dark.

He outlived them all. All those years and what did it really do? All around him – death, death, death.

A voice came out of nowhere, not that there was anywhere here for a voice to come from.

"They really can't see past their own noses, can they?" The exasperation was clear, even in the oddly featureless voice.

A second voice, resonant and strangely calming, answered. "Look again, Rupert."

He could still see his thread, surrounded on all sides by threads cut short, but the points of overlap were gradually growing brighter.

A golden light spread from his own life line along the lines of Buffy, Faith, even former Council members, and where those lines overlapped the glow spread. From their lines it spread to others and, through those, to still other lines.

Everywhere, lines of gold raced out, igniting other lines until all he could see were intricate patterns of gold shooting through an endless tapestry. It stretched off in every directions, an unfathomable pattern of millions upon millions of threads.

He simply couldn't wrap his mind around it. What did it mean?

The second voice came again. "They lived – all of them lived, because you lived. Your duties as a Watcher, your friendship, your love – you did more than you ever knew and chose to spend so much of your life focused on the ends, the snipped threads all around."

Had he had form, he would have fallen to his knees. It was overwhelming. He had never really seen, never understood. It had mattered in the end. All of it had mattered.

He had barely recovered from that surprise, when he got an even bigger one.

The second voice, more resonate and omnipresent than before, reverberated through him even in his incorporeal state.

"Well done good and faithful servant. Well done."

**END.**


End file.
